Frases de Robert Rosen

Robert Rosen . Biólogo teórico norteamericano.

Robert Rosen se declara deudor del horizonte teórico abierto por la Teoría de la Recapitulación de Ernst Haeckel, la teoría de las catástrofes de René Thom y la obra de D'Arcy Thompson Sobre el Crecimiento y la Forma.

Con el objetivo de responder a la clásica pregunta ¿Qué es la vida?, el principal interés de Rosen consistió en el desarrollo de una definición específica de la complejidad y la construcción, a partir de ésta, de un marco teórico adecuado para la comprensión de la complejidad biológica.

El concepto clave en la obra de Rosen es el de organización: "cuando estudiamos un sistema material organizado -sostiene- dejamos de lado la materia para centrarnos en la organización". Sin embargo, la biología ha tendido a ignorar los aspectos organizativos de los seres vivos para centrarse en el material del que están compuestos.

Rosen rechaza otros aspectos de la interpretación ortodoxa de la bioquímica y la biología. Por un lado, Rosen se opone a la idea de que el papel funcional de una proteína pueda ser investigado utilizando exclusivamente la secuencia de aminoácidos, dadas las limitaciones sintácticas intrínsecas al lenguaje de la química. A partir de esta tesis, Rosen sostiene que es imposible encontrar un algoritmo que pueda calcular la estructura tridimensional de una proteína. Por otro lado, en el caso de la biología, Rosen mantiene que la teoría de la evolución darwinista no ofrece ninguna clase de causalidad y que, sin ella, la biología se convierte en una colección de crónicas históricas. Wikipedia  

✵ 27. junio 1934 – 28. diciembre 1998
Robert Rosen: 8   frases 0   Me gusta

Robert Rosen: Frases en inglés

“I do not consider myself a philosopher. I am a biologist, attempting to grapple with the Schrodinger question, “What is Life?” It turns out that this is not an empirical question, to be resolved through observation in a laboratory.”

Rosen, Robert. " On the limitations of scientific knowledge http://www.synapse9.com/ref/Rosen_On_Limitations_of_Sci.pdf." Boundaries and barriers: On the limits to scientific knowledge, Reading, MA: Perseus Books (1996): 199-214.

“The physical structures of organisms play only a minor and secondary role… The only requirement which physical structure must fulfill is that it allow the characteristic behaviors themselves to be manifested. Indeed, if this were not so, it would be impossible to understand how a class of systems as utterly diverse in physical structure as that which comprises biological organisms could be recognised as a unity at all.”

Robert Rosen. "Anticipatory systems in retrospect and prospect," in: General Systems, Vol. 24 (1979), p. 12; AS cited in: Nadin, Mihai. " Anticipation and dynamics: Rosen's anticipation in the perspective of time http://www.nadin.ws/archives/966." International journal of general systems. 39.1 (2010): 3-33.

“Let us begin by observing that the word "system" is almost never used by itself; it is generally accompanied by an adjective or other modifier: physical system; biological system; social system; economic system; axiom system; religious system; and even "general" system. This usage suggests that, when confronted by a system of any kind, certain of its properties are to be subsumed under the adjective, and other properties are subsumed under the "system," while still others may depend essentially on both. The adjective describes what is special or particular; i. e., it refers to the specific "thinghood" of the system; the "system" describes those properties which are independent of this specific "thinghood."
This observation immediately suggests a close parallel between the concept of a system and the development of the mathematical concept of a set. Given any specific aggregate of things; e. g., five oranges, three sticks, five fingers, there are some properties of the aggregate which depend on the specific nature of the things of which the aggregate is composed. There are others which are totally independent of this and depend only on the "set-ness" of the aggregate. The most prominent of these is what we can call the cardinality of the aggregate…
It should now be clear that system hood is related to thinghood in much the same way as set-ness is related to thinghood. Likewise, what we generally call system properties are related to systemhood in the same way as cardinality is related to set-ness. But systemhood is different from both set-ness and from thinghood; it is an independent category.”

Fuente: "Some comments on systems and system theory," (1986), p. 1-2 as quoted in George Klir (2001) Facets of Systems Science, p. 4